


Professional Collaboration

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Greywing and the Flying Outlaws [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU, Green Arrow (Comics), Teen Titans (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Villains, Assassins & Hitmen, Child Abuse, Earth-3, First Meetings, Fluff, Gen, Growing Up Together, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Mirror Universe, Owlman has a Leave One Alive To Mourn thing, Politics, Post-War, Roy manages to be both more and less evil than he thinks he is, Team, at some point i need to tell the story of how Grayson became a caffeine addict, in a weird weird way
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-09 23:22:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6928387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven years more, and Grayson is giving him one of those crabby birdlike head tilts from the other end of the couch as he nurses a coffee. His hair is standing up on one side from bedhead and he looks like nothing so much as an extremely windblown falcon crouching over a kill. </p><p>Rather than jabbing his elbows out like he's mantling his wings, though, he just looks resentful about how noisily Roy is laughing at the newspaper, and it has been somewhere between ten years and three months since mere resentment from Richard Grayson was a source of fear for Arsenal.</p><p>(Four times Roy Harper worked with Talon, and once it wasn't a Talon anymore.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Professional Collaboration

**Author's Note:**

> Roy is seventeen at the beginning, here. The idea that he got called 'white boy' a lot when he was a kid is, so far as I know, exclusively headcanon, but from what I understand about Navajo nicknaming traditions, very likely. 
> 
> Teen rating is simply for all the people getting casually killed around the margin of the story. Because if Arsenal and Talon are working, corpses are statistically probable.

Frankly, there haven't been a lot of times Roy's job has been front man. It's happened—he's young, for the business, and he doesn't really bother to look as hard as he is, let alone try for harder, because that shit's for amateurs, so sometimes he gets sent in to play Normal High School Kid for one reason or another—but mostly, he's the guy with the silent ranged weapon and the fabulous aim.

The _other_ guy with both of those, technically: the less showy one. Oliver has a guy who serves as his body double, and walks around pretending to be him when he is physically absent; one of Roy's things is being his bow-double, and shooting things Queen wants to shoot when he can't do it personally, because he's (again) physically absent. At some point it's going to get out that there's another bowman in the Archer's command, and they won't be able to mess with law enforcement's heads by having Roy kill people with the signature black-fletched arrows when Oliver is attending a televised charity dinner. They'll have to find some new thing.

But anyway, the point is Oliver brought him on for the bow, and he kept him for the bow and because he likes the way Roy can take orders and _think_ about them, and that for the past three and a half years he's been primarily a _sniper_ , and taken up positions where he could cover any teammates he's been saddled with, either with his bow or the rifles he's been learning.

But now he's been sent out with this kid. And while it's true that for about a quarter of a second when Roy first saw him there was all this disappointed incredulity that apparently the mythical Talon came in the form of a scrawny little kid with no pants, that opinion lasted exactly as long as it took for the kid to _move_ , and—he stopped disbelieving damn quick. Talon's head swung around like a bloodhound catching a scent and fixed on Roy, like he might be prey, and for a second he froze, like _he_ thought he might be, too.

It was the silence, really, that made the kid so eerie. No, it was the pallor, like a corpse, like he'd never seen the sun in his life. No, it was the way he was so obviously completely aware of where every part of him was all the time, but didn't move them in relation to each other the way other people did. Normal people. Human people. People who couldn't stay totally stone-still, and who weren't prepared to move instantaneously in any direction at any second.

No, it was the way his _face_ never moved, so out of the corner of his eye Roy kept thinking the whole thing was a mask, one solid piece chin to hairline, and the black domino was just decorative overlay.

Okay, no. All of that _helped_ sell the creepiness, but really it was just that if Talon decided to kill him, Roy would die. There would be no warning until there was a knife between his ribs, and even if he managed to strike back, it wouldn't _matter._

And fuck, it was just one creepy little kid. About the age Roy had been when he first killed a man, but from what he'd heard Talon had been performing hits since he was about waist-high.

"Talon?" he said, like there was any possible doubt.

Nod, stiff and brisk, without _quite_ enough neck bob to make Roy wonder if the assassin kid actually thinks he's a bird—a possibility that should not be ruled out, he has _seen some crazy_ since he left the reservation.

"Okay, then. They call me Arrow." At least, some of them do; he's mostly broken them of calling him 'arrow kid,' and other than that it's largely just 'Harper' and the apparently-inevitable 'Red.' And Shaw, Queen's big, bluff black lieutenant, clapped a hand on his shoulder and called him 'white boy' last month and Roy had this _gut-punch_ of homesickness that transformed itself almost instantaneously into blinding rage, and when he could think again Roy had a cracked bone in his hand, and Shaw had a dislocated jaw and a broken wrist.

He's lucky the boss likes him. "But I'm probably not shooting anybody today."

Talon ducked his chin in the world's most minimalist nod, confirming Roy's presence in a non-sniping capacity.

"You got briefed on the job already, right?"

Nod. Somewhere between the bird-thing and the minimalist version. God, if he spent too much time around this kid he could see himself building up a whole nod _glossary,_ trying to wring out a little more meaning from every nuance of gesture. He's heard of the strong silent type, but this is ridiculous.

"Okay, so. Just to review, I've got a meeting with the Don as myself. I'll give you three clicks on the comm if I see a reason to abort, but if not you come in eighteen minutes after me. As a valued ally, I'll get the Don to safety, while you do your thing. If our paths cross, I'll keep acting as a bodyguard, your job is to make it look like you're trying to take me without, y'know, actually taking me out, but I'll try to avoid that. Meanwhile, you kill everybody. Sound like the plan you got?"

Talon nods yet again. Agreeable guy. Roy checks his weapons, carefully musses up his hair, and heads for the target's house.

Queen likes him, but Roy's still pretty new. He's not privy to the inner workings of plans like this; doesn't know why this one is so stupidly convoluted. They want to hurt Giordano, obviously, and hurt him bad, but they also want him to come out of it well-disposed toward Roy and his organization. (Unless Roy is getting set up somehow, of course.) They're not wiping out his Family, but they are wiping out his family.

Which points to this being Owlman's hit, primarily, because that's not really the Black Bow's style. If they want to send a really clear message to someone who's giving them trouble, they'll take out a loved one, sometimes. Generally from a distance, because bow-sniping is after all kind of a syndicate specialty, especially since Roy joined up.

And to send a message to _everybody else,_ they've been known to gank somebody who crossed them _and_ everybody who was in the way, or just in a certain radius. They've wiped whole families; it's happened. Collateral.

Killing everybody _but_ the one you're out to school, though—that's going past message or collateral. That's a full-on attempt to _destroy_ whoever's pissed you off, and Roy's never seen Queen feel the need to go that far, though admittedly he's only been on the payroll a few years so far. Which is why it's pretty fucking disturbing that, from what he's heard, this is for Owlman practically _standard practice._ He likes leaving lone survivors. This is the _tac nuke_ approach to assassination, and as a sniper who takes pride in his precision, Roy is slightly annoyed by the bombast of it all.

But hey. He's getting paid a seven-kill rate for a little surveillance and low-risk extraction. Not that he'd be willing to trade his normal job for 'Talon support-staff,' even with the price hike, but it's okay for today.

* * *

It's five years later, and Talon's not a kid anymore. Roy's not sure how old he _is,_ but older than Roy was when they met, anyway. He's put on several inches and filled out a lot, though he's still kind of on the skinny side. Black hair still combed back vampire-flat, face almost as creepily pale as ever, and if anything even more expressionless.

This is only the fourth time they've worked together, and the second time it threw Roy for a total loop that the creepy creature had _grown_ , but he's used to it now: for all his vague inhumanity, Talon is human enough to grow up.

"What is Owlman's hard-on for leaving lone survivors?" Roy grouses now, as he, Talon, and Troia clear the devastated compound. Blaze has already jetted off to do his own thing, but flying away from the attack site would be too unsubtle, so Donna's joining Roy (and, buzzkill, Talon) in the exfil truck, before they take separate planes out of Khartoum.

Roy skirts an unstable-looking patch of floor as he grumbles, eyeing one of his arrows pinning a guard to the wall by his throat, and is busy enough wondering how likely it is to come back to bite him that, of the four of them who wiped out this guy's entire extended household for thinking he could get away with turning to some other weapons supplier, _he's_ the only one who leaves behind actual, physical calling cards, that he thinks for a second he misheard when Troia, fanning smoke gaily away from her face, laughs and says, "He's Bruce Wayne."

Then he's jerked his head around, replaying the audio and _totally sure_ he heard that right, especially because Talon's head on the _other_ side of her whipped around too, in total isolation from his shoulders. There's a wild, pointy look to his unmoving mask of a face that Roy recognizes from their last job, in Riga, when he was surrounded by seven swordsmen and every time he focused on one enough to kill him, another one would run him through.

So that would be confirmation, then.

Donna laughs again, sweeping a negligent hand at Talon's tension in the way only the nigh-indestructible superpowered can. "Don't look like that, birdboy. You know, I know, _Queen_ knows. Really don't see the risk in letting Arsenal in on it."

So then of course Talon is looking at _him_ , evaluating the risk of his knowledge, and Roy has to cock one eyebrow and be absolutely unconcerned because showing weakness is basically the #1 way to be classified a liability. "Okay, yeah, who am I going to tell?" Grin for Donna, in spite of her having used his life as a gambling token in some kind of messing-with-Talon game. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Sparkles."

She laughs at him, of course. He likes her like this, when she's in a good mood from just having proved all over again that she can take on the world—she's not actually any more stable than her adopted sister or whatever the hell they are, but she _appreciates_ her power in a way that makes it piss Roy off less.

Roy kicks absently at one of the many smoldering patches Blaze left—asshole did one of those flaming peel-outs on Oliver's new mahogany flooring one time, what the fuck kind of side power is _friction manipulation?_ —because if the building burns down before the target gets home, he can't come home to find the bodies like he's supposed to.

Bruce Wayne, he thinks. Top of Forbes', best of everything, stone-cold sonuvabitch—he and Owlman _individually_ control big sections of the world economy, legal and underground. If they're the same person, he actually comes worryingly close to straight-up _ruling the world_ , though it's mostly just worrying because Oliver is playing the same game but not at the same level, and if Wayne _does_ think of the whole world as the gameboard he's playing on…well, Roy's seen what happens to lesser operations when someone really big decides to really make a play for a town. These cooperative ventures they've been doing more and more of lately, they could be opening moves toward a takeover.

So. Good to have a heads-up on that one.

But also. He's just run through the list of things everybody knows about Wayne, and landed on the only one that makes Donna's answer line up with his question.

Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered in front of him when he was a kid. Lone survivor. Serious trauma, you have to assume.

"Wow," Roy reflects out loud, as the three of them pass through the front gate of the compound, all in a row. "That's…actually kind of pathetic." He feels Talon eyeballing him again around Donna, and rolls his eyes. "Relax, I'm done. No more mocking your lord and master. And no snitching. Come on, we're all in the pot together here."

"Like lobsters," agrees Donna cheerfully. Roy would punch her, if it wouldn't just break his hand.

* * *

It's four years after that, and Garth, squire to the Crown Prince of Atlantis, recoils with a hiss from sharp claws that have raked up his arm.

It's not something the old Talon would have done. The few times Roy saw someone foolhardy or clueless enough to invade his personal space, _that_ Talon ignored it, or stuck a knife into any offending extremities. No middle ground.

"You rot-scaled bottom-feeder," the squire hisses, looming over what Roy keeps disconcertingly finding himself thinking of as 'the new kid.' "I'll—"

"Do nothing," Roy interrupts firmly. And then he's getting the glare, because he really does not have the standing to decide that. _Oliver_ would be on thin ice just declaring that, straight out, here in Atlantis. But hey. This is _definitely_ less of a faux pas than if Owlman's minion-in-chief guts Orin's. "Seriously, Garth. What were you expecting? I know you don't get a lot of experience with birds underwater, but personal space. Look it up."

He beckons impatiently at the kid in the mask, with no pants, and strides confidently off toward the banquet.

He stepped in to head that off because Atlantis tends to lump surface-dwellers together anyway, and the Black Bow is actively allied with the Court of Owls these days, so if Owlman's attack hound savaged Aqualord's lapdog, it would have spelled trouble. Protecting Garth-the-Fishy-Asshat is good politics. Protecting baby Talon, well, that would be just _crazy_. He's four and a half feet of indestructible red and black viciousness. Highly trained death-puppet, and kept on much shorter strings than the last one, too.

(There's no way he reminds Roy of himself, at all.)

* * *

Another three years, and Talon is tiny again. It's not a surprise anymore, though it weirds him out when he thinks about it—Talon is eternal, but Arsenal's been active through _three_ of them now; does that mean the Court of Owls is secretly descending into clusterfuck, or has he just been in this business _that long_?

Superstition tells him not to focus too much on how many years he's survived; his luck will run out.

Rationally, this Talon ought to be a relief. He's stable. Easy to work with. He speaks in complete sentences. He doesn't have a chip on his shoulder. He's a _fellow operative;_ apart from being half Roy's age he's basically an equal. He is so damn good at passing for nearly normal they actually dressed _him_ up as a civvie, to draw a target into position for Roy to shoot, which is definitely a disruption of the fabric of the universe right there.

But how good he is at passing for a person actually makes him _significantly fucking creepier_ , because…well, it's not like Roy doesn't know from killers. He's been killing since he was a kid, himself, even if not quite that young, and it's not as big a deal as people make it out to be. But Talon has always been something special, something beyond mere murder. Roy's just a guy whose best skill happens to be shooting people, and who has the steady nerves and the lack of moral compunctions to use it regularly. Talon is…he doesn't know what. Can't put words to it, as he glances through his sights one last time at the target's cooling corpse, before he packs up his rifle and gets out. But it bothers him.

The Talon he watched grow up, the one who screwed up and disappeared, Roy understood him. Not, like, at all _intimately_ , but for all his blankness, once you got used to him he was pretty straightforward. The second one, the brat Owlman doesn't want anyone to know is now a _vigilante_ of all things? Was even easier to read. If less predictable because he'd had emotions, ones that actually affected his behavior sometimes.

This one, when he has the mask and cape on, he's just as expressionless and deadly as the others. But #1 was an empty shell and #2 was, in retrospect, a broken kid, and the minute you saw them try to function outside Talon's parameters, it showed.

If this one can slide smoothly into a good little boy act and out again, and meet Roy's eyes and give a little _smirk_ , and then wipe the blood off his hands and go back to being Wayne's tidy little ward—and give the kid credit, if he hadn't already known Wayne was the Owl he'd never have recognized Talon in Drake, or Drake in Talon—well. He _can_ do that. All the coiled absolute menace of a Talon, but he didn't pay for it the way the others did.

Roy thinks he might be jealous.

"Arsenal," says that toneless Talon voice from behind him as he reaches ground level, and he _doesn't_ jump. Only because he's had _so much damn practice._ "Extraction point moved. This way."

"Whatever you say, kid," he grumbles.

Talon is silent.

* * *

Seven years more, and Grayson is giving him one of those crabby birdlike head tilts from the other end of the couch as he nurses a coffee. His hair is standing up on one side from bedhead and he looks like nothing so much as an extremely windblown falcon crouching over a kill. Rather than jabbing his elbows out like he's mantling his wings, though, he just looks resentful about how noisily Roy is laughing at the newspaper, and it has been somewhere between ten years and three months since mere resentment from Richard Grayson was a source of fear for Arsenal.

He tosses the paper into Dick's lap instead, so it lands just under the coffee mug, with the front page up. The story he cares about is below the fold, a third-tier story without a photo attached, and the headline reads: ' _Red Hood Awarded Damages From Wayne Estate; Donates Whole Sum to Charity_.'

'First of all,' the story quotes Todd as saying, 'there is not enough money in the _world_ to make up for that, and I'm not going to let the idea that there _could be_ stand for a second. Second, I don't deserve it if there _was_. I survived. A lot of other people didn't. And third, there are so many people who actually _need_ that kind of funding, especially now, why would anybody expect me to hold onto that blood money?'

Such a good little hero. Well. Without taking into consideration that he's _totally_ been funding his fugitive existence with grand larceny this whole time. Mostly from Wayne. How does he rank that in his little I-don't-deserve-reparations rationale?

"There's some stuff about the Civil War and some kind of Freedmen's Bureau on the other page," Roy says, when he sees that Dick's getting near the 'see A5 for more' bit at the bottom of the block of text. Greywing blinks acknowledgement, keeps reading.

"Hey, Grayson," Roy says; grins when Dick glances up at him. "Think you could get a slice of that money if you turned up and filed for reparations?"

"Before or after they clapped me in irons?" Grayson asks. But he's turning to A5, so he's not as disinterested as he's trying to act.

"It would have to be after," says Starfire in her most sensible voice. He didn't know she was listening, but the kitchen where she's been trying to find the perfect balance of spinach, kale, beet greens, beef tongue, and artichoke to make a salad that tastes like home for the past _hour_ is about five feet away. "Even on Tamaran, processing paperwork takes longer than effecting an arrest."

Roy nods and pretends to give this serious consideration. "Okay, so he goes in and files," he says, "and then as soon as he gets the money, we break in and bust him out."

Kori starts laughing into her leafy greens (and raw tongues), and Greywing deliberately folds the newspaper in half, and then into quarters, still lengthwise, and then into eighths, and leans along the length of the couch to smack Roy with it. He deflects, and Dick's bland expression pulls into a look of challenge, followed by another sally. Roy smacks his hands together in his best blade-catch, which isn't that awesome—if Dick had a real knife he'd have at least nicked a tendon, if not successfully stabbed his face.

He doesn't have a real knife, though, at least not in his hand, and Roy smirks. Grayson turns his face on enough to glare a little, which is still not enough to be scary when all he does is twist the newspaper free and scoop around to jab Roy in the ribs with it. "No," he asserts.

It actually takes Roy a second to remember what they were even talking about. "I wasn't serious. Kori, tell this undersocialized moron I wasn't serious!" He's pretty sure Grayson already knows that, or he wouldn't be menacing him with mere paper, but corroborative statements never go amiss.

"I never know whether you're joking," she replies brightly. "Human tones all sound the same to me."

"That is a damned lie. Grayson, she is lying, she knows perfectly well I was joking." He realizes that Dick has, in his usual soundless fashion, withdrawn his limbs back to his own end of the couch and is studying his nascent newspaper-shiv, as if contemplating whether it's worth the effort of opening it up again, just to get the rest of the details of what Todd had to say about his self-righteous donation practices.

He is also, expressionlessly and without making any noise, laughing at Roy.

"Oh, for…drink your coffee," he orders.

As soon as Grayson starts to do so, with a slow diffidence meant to broadcast _not because you said so,_ Roy strips off the first page of the Sports section, balls it up, and wings it at Greywing's face. It's not exactly a sniper-worthy target, but hey. They are currently engaged in the ancient art of lying low. He can do this all day. Or until he runs out of paper. Or until he is all-but-inevitably required to sample beef tongue salad. (Which Grayson may actually manage to like; he is in favor of anything that keeps his iron up, besides the obvious preventative measure of _not bleeding all over the goddamn place._ )

Grayson deflects the first one, and the next two, but then Roy flicks three smaller missiles in rapid succession and their ex-Talon prioritizes not spilling his coffee over not getting hit by newspaper, and Roy pumps his fist as one of his shots glances off his teammate's face.

The exciting life of the fugitive mercenary assassin.

**Author's Note:**

> Wally still refuses to appear on camera, but at least I got Donna and Garth in. (I like Garth. I do. Evil him just strikes me as particularly nonthreatening and stoogelike, right up until he sics endless sharks upon your flesh.) ^^ All original Titans are at least established as existing now, with our retconned-in POV guy rounding out the Founding Members bingo card. And Duela's covered, so next up is…Mal? 
> 
> Damn straight I need Evil Mal. He can even go on just calling himself _Mal_ like he did when he debuted, and as a villain it sounds like an actual code name! :D
> 
> ...also on the table: Lilith Clay.


End file.
